


At This Volume

by lookninjas



Category: Person of Interest (TV)
Genre: Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-10-24
Updated: 2013-10-24
Packaged: 2018-02-03 08:20:53
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,013
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1737785
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/lookninjas/pseuds/lookninjas
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Later on, her mother calls her aunt, and tells her that the doctor said everything was normal, that it was normal for Sameen to be confused about her feelings, that it was normal for her to be angry, that everything she was doing was normal.</p>
<p>It had never occurred to Sameen that she might not be normal, before.</p>
            </blockquote>





	At This Volume

**Author's Note:**

> This is an attempt at a Sam Shaw character study; I’m still finding my footing in this fandom so it probably isn’t perfect, but I think it’s worth putting out to see if it appeals to anyone. Title is obviously a reference to Gen’s line at the end that Sam has the volume turned way down, and also a reference to “Falling Out of Love At This Volume,” by Bright Eyes.

1\. 

 

Her mom shows up before she’s finished her sandwich and sweeps her into her arms, sobbing. Sameen’s pretty sure she should hug her mother back, but her arms are still folded up in front of her, pinned tight between her body and her mom’s, so she can’t. She just stays the way she is, crushed close to her mother’s chest in the darkness.

Afterwards, they go to the hospital, and they shine lights in her eyes and ask her if her head hurts and if she’s dizzy, and she asks for a glass of water, please. Her mother is crying hysterically in the chair next to her, and she’s cold in her paper gown but she can’t have a blanket until the examination is over, even if all they find is a scrape on her forehead, which they swab with alcohol and then cover with a teddy bear band-aid. 

When they’ve finally figured out that there’s nothing else wrong, they give Sameen her clothes back, and a police officer drives them home. He makes them wear their seatbelts, so Sameen’s mother can’t hug her; she holds Sameen’s hand the whole way back to their house. She squeezes so tight it hurts, but Sameen doesn’t say anything. Her mother is probably crying too hard to pay attention anyway.

Back at home, Sameen’s mother tugs her over to the couch and pulls her in tight to her chest and cries and cries and cries.

Sameen waits, patiently, to be let go of.

 

2.

 

It doesn’t occur to her until after. After the funeral, after her mother has stopped crying, after the neighbors have stopped bringing them food. After the kids in her grade have started looking at her again, started talking to her, started teasing her. After Joey Santiago decides that she’s once again a safe target.

She’s never actually hit anybody before, that’s the thing. Joey’s been picking on her for three years and sometimes she’s thought about hitting him, but she’s never actually done it.

She’s not sure why what he says about her father makes her want to hit him so much that she actually does it. But it does, so she does. 

And then she just keeps hitting him, until the recess monitor makes her stop.

Her mother cries, and takes her to see a doctor, and the doctor asks her if she’s sad about her father and she says she guesses she is. He asks her if that’s why she hit Joey and she says she guesses it was. And the doctor doesn’t ask her why she has to guess at what her feelings are; he doesn’t ask her why she doesn’t know for sure whether or not she’s sad. He just smiles and gives her a sucker, and when she asks him if she can have a cherry one instead of one with a question mark on the label, he smiles again and swaps suckers for her.

Afterward, he takes her mother into his office, and Sameen can’t hear what he says from the other side of the door. But later on, her mother calls her aunt, and tells her that the doctor said everything was normal, that it was normal for Sameen to be confused about her feelings, that it was normal for her to be angry, that everything she was doing was normal.

It had never occurred to Sameen that she might not be normal, before. After, though…

After, she starts to wonder.

 

3.

 

Smiling is the first thing she learns how to do. It’s not always easy, but it gets easier with time. Laughing is the next logical step; it takes a little more effort, but she manages to make it sound natural after a while, not forced or strained. 

Crying is harder. She can’t just pinch herself or bite the inside of her cheek; her pain tolerance is too high. Eventually, she works out a way of unfocusing her eyes that makes them go a little watery, and sniffing hard through her nose and taking short, hitching breaths is usually enough to take care of the rest. It takes time to figure it all out, but she’s lucky; she doesn’t actually need to cry until she’s most of the way through high school and her grandfather finally dies, and even then she doesn’t have to cry very much. Her mom does most of the crying for her — she’s always been good like that. Sam can just wrap her arm around her mother’s shoulders and look somber, which is easier than smiling anyway. 

And when her cousin Farouk says that maybe her mom is doing a little too much crying, that her mother is less than normal —

Any normal person would be angry at that, so Sam doesn’t bother to fake a smile. She doesn’t hit him, either, or even shout, but she lets herself be angry.

It’s the one emotion she does really well. It’s kind of nice to have the chance to show off.

 

4.

 

The one thing she can’t fake is a startle reflex. There’s a split second of hesitation required for her to recognize the presence of a stimulus and find the appropriate physical response before she can actually go ahead and respond, and while that doesn’t matter with smiling or laughter or tears, it’s everything when it comes to an actual reflexive gesture. She tries for a little while, but the gap between everyone else’s flinches and hers is highly noticeable, and eventually she decides it’s not worth it. So she gives up on trying to act startled.

Of course, just because she’s given up flinching doesn’t mean that other people don’t try to make her. She endures two years of her fellow Marines sneaking up on her (badly), and yelling in her ear (loudly) before she finally snaps.

The thing about the Marines is that their version of “normal” is surprisingly flexible when it comes to what might, in other places, be termed “assault.” She gets a lecture from her commanding officer and a warning that further outbursts might be grounds for discharge, but no one acts like she’s done anything that out of the ordinary, and there’s definitely no thought of sending her to a psychiatrist for testing. 

That’s later, when ISA comes calling.

And ISA doesn’t want normal anyway.

 

5.

 

The thing about the phrase “Axis II Personality Disorder” is that it’s awful, but the alternatives are worse. 

"Sociopath" is the sort of thing teenage boys wish they were, and "antisocial" is what they usually actually are. "Psychopath" and "schizoid" are too easily confused for "psychotic" and "schizophrenic," neither of which apply. She’s not afraid of people; she doesn’t get lost inside her own "inner world," and no one could do what she does if they had problems with "poor impulse control." She can be superficially charming, when she needs to be, but then so can most other people. And she’s not out of touch with her feelings; there’s just nothing there to touch. 

But it’s the idea of having an easy explanation. Not for herself, because she doesn’t need it, but for everyone else. For the times when she doesn’t want to pretend to be normal but doesn’t want to have to deal with other people’s inability to accept that she is, in fact, different. She can say, “Axis II Personality Disorder,” and it’s vague enough that it could mean anything but sounds official enough to stop the discussion. Most people don’t know what it means, but most people don’t like admitting to what they don’t know, so they just shut up.

It’s not perfect, but it’s useful. Most days, that’s enough.

 

6.

 

It’s not so much that Cole never expected her to be normal. He did, when they met. Most people do. 

So she hated him for a while, just like she hates most people.

But then he got used to her, and he stopped looking at her like he was waiting for her to suddenly have an explosion of feelings. He stopped waiting for her to be normal and started treating her like she already was. And she stopped hating him, because she didn’t need to anymore. 

She even liked him, after a while. It was the first time in a long time she’d felt comfortable around anyone.

After he died, she tried not to think about the time he’d spent expecting her to be normal and the time she’d spent hating him in retaliation. Not because it felt like a betrayal of his memory; honestly, how the hell do you betray a memory in the first place? It’s a thought, not a person. It isn’t real. But what is real is the possibility that if she learned to stop hating Cole, if she learned to actually like him, then she might actually learn to like someone else, sometime. 

It’s not that she’s afraid to lose someone else. It’s not that the idea makes her sad. But she’s starting to think that she’s gotten a little too good at being angry. She doesn’t need to add more fuel to the fire.

Even the most self-control will only take you so far.

 

7.

 

The thing that Finch doesn’t seem to understand is that Shaw is perfectly capable of being charming when she wants to be. She could smile effortlessly by thirteen, cry on cue by sixteen. She can be demure and ladylike, she can be seductive. She can do anything except for flinch. She can do charming. She can do it very well.

When she was with ISA, she did it all the time.

Which is why she doesn’t want to do it anymore.

This is supposed to be her second chance.

She’s been trying to find a way to explain it to him, but every time she tries to rehearse the conversation in her head, it ends in tea and sympathy. Finch is a fusser, and she’s working at building up a tolerance to it, but it’s a slow process. And she’s attached enough to Bear that she doesn’t want to lose access to him by snapping at Finch.

It’ll all come out some day, one way or another. Hopefully, Finch will be more used to her when it does. She really doesn’t want to steal his dog from him if she absolutely doesn’t have to.

 

8.

 

After Shaw rescues Gen and Finch blows up a building, after Dr. Madani has checked Gen over and stitched up Shaw’s arm and disinfected the scrapes on Reese’s knuckles (with Reese smiling like a self-satisfied cat the entire time), after Shaw has finally gotten her cherry sucker and they’ve all gotten a little sleep, Shaw and Finch take Gen out to the dog park. Shaw watches Gen throw the ball for Bear and doesn’t get up and take it from her even though she could throw it a lot farther, and when Finch gets himself a cup of tea he buys her one too, but he doesn’t fuss over whether or not she drinks it. He just works on his laptop while she watches Gen, and after a while he closes it again, puts it back in its case, zips it up.

"Well," he says. "At least the matter of Gen’s legal guardianship has been officially resolved."

"A reclusive billionaire with a ward," Shaw murmurs, and sips her tea. "Where have I heard that one before."

"An abandoned library isn’t exactly the same as stately Wayne manor," Finch says, "but I suppose it’ll do in a pinch. As long as no one expects me to start wearing a rubber suit."

He turns, then, that full-body twist, wearing just the smallest of smiles. It’s not a normal smile, of course — nothing about Harold is normal. And maybe that’s why it doesn’t feel so much like pretending when Shaw lets the corner of her mouth twitch upwards in response.

Harold’s smile widens a fraction, and then he turns and goes back to watching Gen, sipping his tea.

Shaw thinks, maybe, she’ll be able to explain things to him soon.


End file.
